The Shaping of Africa

Cosmographic Discourse and Cartographic Science in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Francesc Relaño

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351761390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This title was first published in 2002. When did Africa emerge as a continent in the European mind? This book aims to trace the origins of the idea of Africa and its evolution in Renaissance thought. Particular attention is given to the relationship between the process of acquiring knowledge through travel and exploration, and its representation within a discourse which also includes previously acquired cosmographical elements. Among the themes investigated are: How did the image of Africa evolve from the conception of a symbolic space to a Euclidean representation? How did the Renaissance rediscovery of Antiquity interact with the Portuguese discoveries along the African coast? And once Africa was circumnavigated, how was the inner landmass depicted in the absence of first-hand knowledge? Also, overall, in this whole process what was the interplay of myth and reality?

Part 1

The African Puzzle

Illud ante omnia mihi dicendum est opiniones veteres parum exactas esse et rudes. Circa verum adhuc errabatur; nova omnia erant primo temptantibus; postea eadem ilia limitata sunt. Et, si quid inventum est, illis nihilominus referri debet acceptum; magni animi res fuit rerum naturae latebras dimovere nec contentum exteriore eius aspectu introspicere et in deorum secreta descendere. Plurium ad inveniendum contulit qui speravit posse reperiri. Cum excusatione itaque veteres audiendi sunt. Nulla res consummata est, dum incipit; nec in hac tantum re omnium maxima atque involutissima, in qua, etiam cum multum actum erit, omnis tamen aetas quod agat inveniet, sed et in omni alio negotio longe semper a perfecto fuere principia.¹

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The Renaissance was not a complete break with the past, nor an absolute beginning. The domain of cosmography in general, and the formation of the idea of Africa in particular, were not an exception. The three pillars on which this idea was constructed (Affrica pars, the Antipodes/Antoeci, and Ethiopia) were still separate entities with seemingly no relationship between one another in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But a study of each of these three geographical concepts in their own right will show that the Renaissance idea of Africa came to light from the integration of the medieval basis within a new framework.

Note

1 ‘Before anything else, I must say that the old theories are crude and inexact. Men were still in error about the truth. Everything was new for men who were making the first attempts. Later these same theories were refined. Yet, if anything has been discovered, it nonetheless ought to be acknowledged as having been received from them. It was the achievement of a great spirit to move aside the veil from hidden places and, not content with the exterior appearance of nature, to look within and to descend into the secrets of the gods. The man who had the hope that the truth could be found made the greatest contribution to its discovery. And so the ancients must be listened to, indulgently. Nothing is completed while it is at the beginning. This is true not only in this subject (which is the greatest and most complex of all), but in every other business as well. Even though much will have been done on this subject, every age will nonetheless find something to do. As in every other subject, the first beginnings have always been far away from the completed knowledge.’

Chapter 1

Canon and variations on the medieval ecumene

Toda obra que he de seer perfeita, requere que seja posta em numero ternayro, scilicet, que aja principio e meyo e fim; pera cujo milhor conhecimento he bem que saibamos que son tres ternaryos en a geeral universidade do mudo … o ternaryo he conto de toda causa, e elle carra em sy tal perfeiçom, e meyo, e certa fim, deque nhua criatura fica isenta. E por esto foe establecido antiigamente que Deos em ternaryo fose louvado.¹

Gomes Eanes de Zurara

In the Middle Ages, the range of spatial comprehension of any individual human being was rather limited, and the environment directly experienced rather small. For the vast majority of people in that period, the ‘familiar space’ did not normally go beyond the nearest regional market. But there have always been, in any given time, some individuals who have attempted to transcend these limitations and who have tried to apprehend the ‘unknown horizons’ to the point of encompassing an image of the whole world.

The geographical lore of Latin science in the first twelve centuries of the Christian Era, expressed through the concept of ecumene, derived mostly from books and tradition rather than from observation by eyewitnesses of the physical features of the earth. Certainly, no writer was so completely immersed in the past, or the authority of the Bible, that he failed altogether to respond to the reality of his day. Even in the most learned works there are occasional passages drawn from contemporary observations of merchants, soldiers and pilgrims. But to attempt a description of the whole world, with its cosmological and theological implications, necessarily involved a certain degree of abstract reasoning.

The Christian ecumene was a mental continuum of inhabitable space topologically closed through the combination of different and often contradictory theories which can be traced back to Classical Antiquity. The first of these theories was primarily held by the Pythagoreans and worked out in detail by Crates of Mallos in the second century before Christ.² It gained currency in the patristic period through the works of Macrobius and Martianus Capella,³ both dating from the fifth century but enjoying an extraordinary popularity throughout the Middle Ages. Finally, it became a well-known theory in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries through the works of William of Conches, Abelard of Bath, Geoffrey of St Victor, Robert Grosseteste and many others.⁴

Essentially, the Cratesian system maintained as its hypothesis the existence of four inhabited landmasses on the surface of the globe. These bodies of land were separated from one another by two oceans encircling the earth, one running east and west passing through the equatorial regions, and another running north and south at a right angle to the other. As a consequence, the earth appeared to be a sphere, mostly covered by water, on which four small ‘islands’ emerged, each being located symmetrically across from one of the others. The large extent of the ocean made any communication difficult, if not impossible, among the eventual inhabitants of these small bodies of land.⁵

The essence of Crates’ idea could not pass unchallenged in the patristic period by the Fathers of the Church, notably by Lactantius and St Augustine.⁶ The reason was quite simple: the Cratesian theory involved the existence of antipodeans dwelling in quarters inaccessible to men of the northern hemisphere, and this idea was highly inconsistent with one of the basic principles of the Christian doctrine, that is the unity of all human beings descending from Adam and redeemed by Christ.⁷ In view of this contradiction, the Fathers of the Church tended to value a rather literal interpretation of the Scriptures over any of the human intellectual constructions, even if coming from the classical legacy.⁸ Keeping this principle in mind, most of the authors of the patristic period found it possible to solve the seeming paradox just by saying that in reality only one of the four landmasses was actually inhabited, the one of ‘our own race’.⁹ Therefore, the first cosmographical consequence of this line of reasoning to be stressed is that the Christian ecumene appeared to be a small portion of land if compared with the immensity of the whole globe.

Another sequence of inferences which helped late medieval authors to define the Christian ecumene was also primarily rooted in classical antiquity, namely in the Aristotelian theory of the four elements.¹⁰ This was a very common way of explaining the physical events and conditions of this world as regulated by the regions of the universe below the sphere of the moon’s orbit. It became a particularly popular world view after John of Holywood (Sacrobosco) wrote his De sphaera at the beginning of the thirteenth century.¹¹

The theory of the four elements was an abstract conception which seemed to contradict the observation of the physical features of the earth’s surface. It postulated that the sublunar regions of the cosmos were composed of four elements (fire, air, water and earth) arranged in decreasing concentric spheres according to their respective gravity. According to this view, it was logical to infer that the earth might theoretically be enclosed within the sphere of water.¹² This conclusion, however, seemed to be ridiculous at the level of the most basic evidence gained through empirical experience. It was a contradiction which particularly puzzled the scholars of the late Middle Ages because since the De caelo had reached Western Europe at the beginning of the twelfth century, Aristotle had become a fundamental authority. Only another authority of at least comparable weight was to be able to reconcile the Aristotelian theory with the current practice showing a part of the earth established on the waters: the Bible.¹³

Several passages of the Scriptures state that the Lord of lords established the earth above the waters, namely in Psalm 103. But it was mainly on account of Genesis that most of the late medieval scholars developed the theory of the congregatio aquae in order to explain the existence of emerged lands in harmony with Aristotelian physics. According to the description of the Creation on the third day, God said: ‘Let the waters that are under the heaven be gathered together into one place; and let the dry land appear. And it was so done’.¹⁴ This meant that it was by the intercession of God’s wish to preserve a dry area whereon man and animals might thrive that an apparent reversal of the natural laws was to be witnessed on the surface of the earth. Therefore, it was possible to think that before the congregation of waters the Aristotelian elements were arranged in four perfect concentric spheres. It was the action of God who changed the natural order of things. In this manner, late medieval scholars provided a logical explanation for the emerged lands which, at the same time, brought in the authority of the Scriptures and left Aristotle’s reputation intact.

The theory of the four elements, modified by providential intervention, had other cosmographical implications in the minds of medieval scholars. It was believed, for instance, that the dry area that appeared after the congregation of waters was only to be verified in one part of the earth. This region was promptly identified as being the known lands located in the northern hemisphere where the Christians dwelt. So, contrary to the Cratesian theory, the world view harmonizing Aristotelian physics with the Scriptures only took into account the existence of a single landmass: the Christian ecumene. The rest was a huge and undivided ocean covering the rest of the earth’s surface. Furthermore, a medieval principle superimposed onto the classical theory of the four elements proclaimed that the volume of one element to the next was governed by the ratio of one to ten in decreasing order of density.¹⁵ This meant, for instance, that the extent of water gathered together by God was ten times bigger than the emergent dry land. Therefore, the Christian ecumene as defined by this theory was not only a single body of land but it was also a small one; very small, if compared with the extent of the encircling ocean.

In sum, both the Cratesian theory, so popular during the patristic period and, later on, the providential explanation of the theory of the four elements, stressed a similar cosmographic principle in medieval consciousness: the inhabitable and actually inhabited world is rather small. In Macrobius’ terms, it is just a macula lost in the immensity of an unknown globe.¹⁶

Other common explanations overlapping with the above-mentioned world-view systems, like the theory of zones, also limited the extent of the ecumene and reasserted its small size from another perspective.¹⁷ Being then clear that this was a well-established attribute of the inhabitable world right through the Middle Ages from different points of view, and a commonplace among most authors, I shall now briefly analyse a second outstanding characteristic of the Christian ecumene: its schematic representation.

In addition to the cosmographic treatises, a complete evaluation of the medieval image of the world demands an overview of the parallel production of cartographic material. Like writing, a map is a way of graphically expressing mental concepts and images. It is, therefore, a very powerful tool for a thorough comprehension of the geographic domain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: The African Puzzle
• Part 2: The Limits of Symbolic Space: From Allegorical Geometry to a Figurative World
• Part 3: Charting Euclidean Space: The Cartography of the Great Discoveries
• Part 4: From the Form to the Contents: The Design of the Unknown
• Conclusions: The Projection of the Renaissance Tradition
• Bibliography
• Index